Five Critical Shortcomings of WhatsApp in Enabling Business Collaboration

By  Satish Shenoy @sbshenoy

WhatsApp is a free messaging app that has taken the world by storm, reaching one billion users in a relatively short time. Consumers have gone to WhatsApp in droves driven by the need to communicate from mobile devices without racking up expensive SMS or text messaging charges. Using WhatsApp, users can send messages with text, images, audio, and video, which can be useful as a lifestyle app.  Lately, consumers have started increasingly using WhatsApp to connect with their colleagues, partners and customers. This is an alarming trend given some critical shortcomings of WhatsApp as a business collaboration tool:

Enterprise Grade Security and Privacy: Given the recent rise of the use of personal messaging applications for on-demand commerce globally, these applications need to support the highest levels of security with end-to-end encryption and privacy. The expected level of encryption in an enterprise environment is SSL/HTTPS encryption for data in motion and AES 256-bit encryption for data at rest, which WhatsApp lacks. It also has other debilitating vulnerabilities including susceptibility to malware, crashing when encountering messages with special characters or messages of large sizes, hackers being able to bypass privacy settings and being able spy on other users, among other problems. While these issues may only be unsettling for consumers, they have devastating consequences for businesses.

Data Control: When employees use WhatsApp with partners and customers, they may communicate confidential and proprietary data that may end up in the wrong hands. Since there is no control over that data, when an employee leaves the company, any data that was shared using WhatsApp is gone forever with the employee – this may have especially damaging effects if the employee goes to work for the competition. Companies also need to be able to transfer data from previous employees to backfills or replacements when their current employees leave. 

Data Archival: Companies need the ability to archive data to meet internal business requirements such as retrieval and reference and to meet regulatory compliance. The data to be archived as well as the method using which to archive it should be fully in control of the company.  Data that is shared within WhatsApp is not available to the company and hence cannot be archived.

Rich Collaboration Capabilities: Business professionals, especially those that are mobile, need the ability to collaborate on the go. While one can send text, images, audio, and video files using WhatsApp, collaborating over content is critical for enterprise users. These users should be able to access content from any public cloud (or private cloud repository) and then collaborate with others using rich annotation, voice tags, signatures, multi-party voice and video collaboration, etc.– This enables users to collaborate efficiently and companies to seamlessly enhance the productivity of their employees.

Embedding Collaboration into the Business Workflow: Across enterprises today, there is a big concern around continuous customer engagement and customer retention. A number of the collaboration applications being used today can create a decent collaboration experience but not WITHIN the business workflow or application – the user needs to step outside of that workflow or application in order to collaborate. That could mean reduced user engagement and user churn. WhatsApp neither has the rich collaboration capabilities nor allows for those capabilities to be embedded in the business workflow or application. 

In conclusion, it is critical for companies to be vigilant in investing their scarce resources, their money, their time and even their future into an enterprise-grade collaboration tool that truly solves business needs. Such a collaboration tool should enhance the business workflow while not exposing the organization to unnecessary risk, privacy issues or the loss of control over proprietary and confidential information.  Anything short of that could mean some seriously negative business impact including data leakage or data loss, expensive lawsuits, or worse, becoming irrelevant in the marketplace over time.

Satish Shenoy is the Vice President of Global Channels at Moxtra and has had extensive experience in desktop and mobile collaboration, including Unified Communications and Contact Centers.